I am trying to research the campaign against Senator Birch Bayh by the rightwing conservatives of the Koch bros., and the rest of what would become the Tea Party…

…and I found this gem of Bayh speaking about the Bork nomination.  I can’t recall when politicians acted for the good of the country instead of their wallets and continually trying to get elected.  You would be shocked at the emails I received every.single.day when I worked for the newspaper, from these what can only be described as attention-whores.  They would send out “news releases” if they stepped outside their office for two seconds.  Even for a cynic like me, it was eye-opening how much time they devoted to putting out press releases instead of actually getting off their butts to work.

Watching Bayh, I see how formidable he was and how the Koch Party saw him, and Church, McGovern, et al, as threats.  Bayh (and Church) would not have stood for illegal and unethical goings-on.  They had to be destroyed.

I’m going to continue researching this, but in the meantime, here is the excellent video.

**edited to add this link on the dirty campaign against Bayh.

There was sooo much going on during this tumultuous time that it’s hard to put everything in a piece to give it context.

There was also just a massive protest by the Boomers of conformity.  We hated it.  Girls were required to wear dresses to school.  Boys were required to keep their hair cut to a certain length — long hair was seen as being disobedient to authority.

Girls started wearing pants to school and were promptly sent home to change.  But girls everywhere started protesting by wearing pants, and they had to relent.

Boys started wearing their hair long, and wow you would think they were holding guns to the head of the authorities.  The girls let their “hair hang out” with growing it as long as they could — down to their butts if they could. Prior to this, girls were using curlers and tons of hairspray to keep tightly controlled hairdos.  Helmet head, if you will.

Just by our shear massive numbers, we were able to break some stupid rules that had no bearing on quality of life — they were nobody else’s business but our own.  I think even these little “victories” frightened the authorities and Kent State was more than just those students, but about the youth in general.

With that, here is a favorite song of that era about the importance hair played in the 60s and 70s: (ignore the creepy guy introducing the Cowsills)

(Indiana has a bill that will turn the National Guard into a police force.  This will not end well.)

On a sunny, gorgeous Spring day in May, four students at Kent State University in Ohio were gunned down by the National Guard, which the Governor of Ohio sent to quell student protestors.  The Vietnam war protests had become intense after President Nixon invaded Cambodia.  He had lied and said we were getting out, but instead ramped things up.  About a week after this, students at Jackson State were also shot.

My prior posts on Kent State:

Birch Bayh, my Senator at the time, started asking questions.  

**edited 5.4.18:  Birch Bayh moved away from Indiana after leaving politics.  I always wondered why.  Now knowing how Indiana is steeped with freemasonry, and their involvement in war and evil acts, he probably discovered this during his investigation of what happened at Kent State.  I truly believe this was a dress rehearsal of what they are doing now.  They will likely involve the National Guard in whatever they have planned.

A student’s documentary on Kent State.  Note how dramatic the Governor is in describing these 18-22-year-old kids as if they were hardened terrorists part of some bigger organization.  They were not. They were unarmed.  They were angry at being lied to while their buddies die in Vietnam, as Alan Canfora experienced.

As the documentary acknowledges, only two of those killed were actually part of the protests — the other two were just walking to class.  And those shot were several hundred feet away — not a threat to the Guardsmen.

Nixon, et al, had made the claim that we had to go to Vietnam to stem the tide of Communism, however, according to Dr. Martin Luther King, only 25% of Vietnamese were Communists.  After the invasion of the U.S., however, they turned to Communism.  Interesting, eh?

My former blog on the families demanding a new probe into the Kent State murders.  The Obama Administration refuses to open a new probe of the incident.

This from counterpunch.

~~~~~~~~~

The government claim—that guardsmen were under attack at the time of the ONG barrage of bullets—has long been suspect, as there is nothing in photographic or video records to support the “under attack” excuse. Rather, from more than a football field away, the Kent State student protesters swore, raised their middle fingers, and threw pebbles and stones and empty tear gas canisters, mostly as a response to their campus being turned into a battlefield with over 2,000 troops and military equipment strewn across the Kent State University campus.

Then at 12:24 p.m., the ONG fired armor-piercing bullets at scattering students in a parking lot—again, from more than a football field away.

~~~~~~~~~~~

The other major piece of Kent State evidence identified in Allen’s analysis was the “sound of sniper fire” recorded on the tape. These sounds point to Terry Norman, FBI informant and provocateur, who was believed to have fired his low-caliber pistol four times, just seventy seconds before the command-to-fire.

Mangels wrote in the Plain Dealer, “Norman was photographing protestors that day for the FBI and carried a loaded .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model . . . five-shot revolver in a holster under his coat for protection. Though he denied discharging his pistol, he previously has been accused of triggering the Guard shootings by firing to warn away angry demonstrators, which the soldiers mistook for sniper fire.”4

Video footage and still photography have recorded the minutes following the “sound of sniper fire,” showing Terry Norman sprinting across the Kent State commons, meeting up with Kent Police and the ONG. In this visual evidence, Norman immediately yet casually hands off his pistol to authorities and the recipients of the pistol show no surprise as Norman hands them his gun.5

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ohio Governor James “Jim” Rhodes claimed the burning of the ROTC building on the Kent State University campus was his reason for “calling in the guard,” yet in this picture of the burning building, the ONG are clearly standing before the flames as the building burns.10

From eyewitness accounts, the burning of the ROTC building at Kent State was completed by undercover law enforcement determined to make sure it could become the symbol needed to support the Kent State war on student protest.11

According to Dr. Elaine Wellin, an eyewitness to the many events at Kent State leading up to and including May 4th, there were uniformed and plain-clothes officers potentially involved in managing the burning of the ROTC building.   Wellin was in close proximity to the building just prior to the burning and saw a person with a walkie-talkie about three feet from her telling someone on the other end of the communication that they should not send down the fire truck as the ROTC building was not on fire yet.12

~~~~~~~~~~

“Mr. Norman was not working for the FBI on May 4, 1970, nor has he ever been in any way connected with this Bureau,” director J. Edgar Hoover declared to Ohio Congressman John Ashbrook in an August 1970 letter.

Three years later, Hoover’s successor, Clarence Kelley, was forced to correct the record. The director acknowledged that the FBI had paid Norman $125 for expenses incurred when, at the bureau’s encouragement, Norman infiltrated a meeting of Nazi and white power sympathizers in Virginia a month before the Kent State shootings.18

~~~~~~~~~~

(You might recall Hoover’s FBI was also hounding Martin Luther King, Jr.  —  blackmailing him about his extramarital affair, and encouraging him to commit suicide.)

I can’t help but contrast this to today’s events in Baltimore– it’s unreal that those responsible for murdering students will never be held accountable.  Contrast CNN’s coverage of Baltimore and the recent ceremony of Bloody Sunday …with that of Kent State…where is the justice??

Some feel that when John F. Kennedy was shot, it was the end of innocence for the nation….perhaps, but I would say that Kent State certainly impacted a nation that spouts off on how we have the freedom to protest, the freedom to assemble to address grievances against our government…but  the events tell a different story.    I think it had a chilling effect…look at how people are intimidated into getting vaccinations and how forced vaccination is even being touted by the fearful ones.

We’re just One Nation Under Fear…

**edited to add:  You know, recently Louis C.K. had portrayed the Boomers as being the generation that ruined EVERYTHING, especially the environment.  And in that piece, there were comments below the video that the Boomers protested the Vietnam war, but as soon as they got the draft revoked, they no longer cared.  Well, I didn’t agree with that, either, but thinking about Kent State and the chilling effect of unarmed student protestors murdered…THAT is more likely the reason why the Boomers suddenly became silent.  Know your history, folks.  Know your history.

(…silly, I know, but it made me smile)

Anyhoo, I have found yet another “weed” to eat — wild violets.  This is particularly important to me because if the properties of the plants help diminish breast lumps, whether they be benign or cancerous, I’m so there.  I still have the two breast lumps I discovered three years ago.  They started to grow recently, and I was a little worried, but now are starting to shrink again.  I’m still leaning towards them being benign, because if they were cancerous, I think they would have grown more by now.

And have you noticed that every single one of these “weeds” contain either Vitamin A, Vitamin C, or both?  Does that not tell you something about how wonderful nature is and how we are being taken care of, if we’d only open our minds and our eyes?? Nature has provided the cures to our ailments.  Not Big Pharma.  Not anything made by humankind.

It still boggles my mind that we shoot up people with horrible chemicals to stop the spread of cancer.  And then spray cancer-causing chemicals to try to kill off the very plants that can likely cure cancer!

**edited to add:  Folks, I’ve learned that wild violets are high in salicylates.  So…if you’re especially sensitive, as heavy metal toxic folks are, you might want to limit the amount to ingest.  I tried them — just 4 or 5 leaves/flowers mid-morning, and then another 4 or 5 in early afternoon…and boy, is it potent!

It does a great job cleaning the lymph system, so it is especially good for the Spring, when we need to detox the winter “sludge” from our system.

Louis C.K. admits his generation ruined EVERYTHING.

First, they said in the comments that Louis C.K. ISN’T EVEN A BOOMER, but a millenial.

Secondly, the destruction of the environment did not start with the Boomers.  It started with the WWII generation.  They began using the diluted  poisonous war surplus chemicals as herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers.

Rachel Carson started the environmental movement, but it was the Boomers who took the ball and ran with it.  You would not have the regulations in place if it were not for the Boomers.  You would not have Earth Day if it were not for the Boomers.  My own awareness came from older Boomers explaining about the environment and what we were doing to it.  Yes, it would take many, many years later for that seed to bloom, but there it is.

To drop this load at the Boomers feet is a gross misrepresentation of my generation.  I’m sick of the Boomers being characterized as the “me” generation, when we fought against the Vietnam War, for women’s rights, and for civil rights.

The hippies, especially, are degraded as being losers.  They simply “got it” before the rest of us did.  No, I’m not saying they’re the answer to it all…because nobody has all the answers.  But together, we have the answers.  It’s been my thought for some time that the Creator has played a neat trick on us…that we each have a piece of the puzzle, and it’s up to us to work together to figure out how to deal with problems and issues as they come up.  The problem is when a few powerful foist their opinions on the rest without consideration nor concern.

Not one generation can nor should take the blame for what is happening.  I could point to the Gen Xers and all the younger ones and say that the electronic devices that they love contain cadmium/heavy metals/plastics and THAT is horrible for the environment when they discard this years’ version for the newest.  But that is just a piece of the environmental pie and we are all responsible for the planet.

**end of rant

…oh, to have Photoshop on my home computer….I’d put a big ole’ wad of cash in Bill Clinton’s outstretched hand…and some sticking out of his jacket…and a top hat on his head with more cash stuck in the band…

Heh.